BY JONATHAN CANNON

HERALD DEMOCRAT

Following suit with other area school districts that closed their doors for a few days due to high illness-related absences earlier this month, Savoy Independent School District officials decided Monday to close the district for three days.

Superintendent Brian Neal said the district's absences had been climbing and when students filled the classrooms Monday morning, about 15 percent were absent. The district continued to send students home during the day, and by afternoon the absentee percentage was up to 20 percent. Neal said many of the students who were sent home Monday had flu-like symptoms.

"We were doing really well while some of our area districts were having some trouble," Neal said. "We'd been cleaning extremely aggressively ever since the first day of school, and I thought that might have helped us a little bit."

The district will reopen for classes on Friday, hopefully giving students time to recover.

Neal said the time of the closure has caused the district to reschedule its homecoming activities, which were planned for this week.

"I didn't want it to affect the kids' homecoming and so we're going to move all our homecoming activities," Neal said. The activities will be held during basketball season, but the exact dates have not been decided.

So far, Neal said, he hasn't gotten any feedback from parents on the decision, but leading up to Monday, parents, noticing increasing absences, had begun to question if a closure would be necessary. Ultimately, Neal said, "the decision was based on what we thought was in the best interest of our kids' safety and health."